Marie Crouzevialle, ETH Zürich, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 24 June).

Construal level and achievement motivation: Beliefs and meta-motivational knowledge about the benefits and downsides of low-level and high-level construal

Construal level theory (Liberman & Trope, 2008) identifies abstraction as the key process that allows forming representations of distal objects such as goals, ambitions, and plans, and affords expansion of one’s regulatory scope beyond the here-and-now (Fujita, Trope, & Liberman, 2015). We relied on a meta-motivational approach to test whether people recognize the selective motivational benefits of abstract vs. concrete mindset. In the first line of research, results across eight experiments (N = 1110) shows that people associate abstraction with incremental theories and detect its relevance in situations that require progressing and projecting one’s competences into the future; we investigate how those beliefs about abstraction guide impression formation and mentalizing. In the second line of research (N = 430), we report evidence that individuals do recognize the benefits of low-level construal for task focus and performance when the achievement situation carries distraction and threat.